Soulbond's place after buff rework: Make Soulbond a Passive Ability

Woot

Dalayan Adventurer
Soulbond is in a strange place now after the buff rework. Let's look at how the buff rework changes the act of buffing and how Soulbond can better fit into that.

One of the main changes to gameplay with the buff rework is now the need (especially in raids) to constantly recast buffs as people die, as you can only soulbond a single buff at a time, and as people join / leave the raid, you end up having to recast buffs a lot. It is tiresome to constantly have to go back and forth between buff spells memmed and normal spells memmed, and recast all your buffs (save perhaps for 1 if you're fortunate enough to have everyone in the raid have it soulbound) whenever someone in the raid dies or switches out.

Since there is a maximum number of buffs and certain people don't want certain buffs in raids where buffers are constantly re-buffing, raiders find themselves constantly looking through their buff list to click off buffs they don't want at the time. These are buffs they don't necessarily want to block permanently, but at that time for their class they aren't as useful as other buffs so they are clicked off to keep the buff slots from being full.

Having to constantly have buffers go back to their spellbook and rebuff the entire raid whenever anyone dies, and the raid having to recheck and click off their buffs every time this happens boils down to tedious gameplay. Fortunately this has a relatively simple solution.

Make Soulbond a Passive Ability

With most buffs being 10 minute buffs, Soulbond makes more sense as a passive ability that affects any buff rather than a 1hr 10min recast for a single 10 minute buff. It also fixes the issues of having to constantly rebuff the raid whenever a single person dies, and takes pressure off people to constantly keep an eye on their buffs and click off the ones they don't want at the time.

As a side note to this, pets have also been hurting since the buff rework and are far weaker since they now no longer have consistent buffs up. The raid definitely doesn't recast all buffs because a pet died, so making Soulbond a passive ability will ensure those buffs transfer to pets when they are resummoned, bringing pets more back in line with their previous power.
 
Last edited:
Soulbound certainly seems to have taken a hit in usefulness.

Perhaps, it could be made to target a player or pet. It adds a buff which fades on death, but keeps the rest of the buffs intact.

I see such a change being helpful for tanks, and pullers, and helping out with pet issue mentioned above.

*edit*
On second thought, working like a death save on pets say maybe like 75% would be more likely. I can't imagine how you would code a re-summon of a pet to come back with its previous buffs.
 
Last edited:
I like the idea, but you still end up having to rebuff a ton. So, I actually think the real solution is making buffs last 20 minutes or 30 minutes. It was fairly arbitrary 10 minutes was chosen. It is obviously not enough time. Will people log in a buff bot every 20 minutes for rebuffs? No way
 
Passive Soulbond on the core short duration buffs is the direction this needs to go, absolutely. Being a Shaman in raids right now feels terrible. I'm refreshing 3-5 buffs every time a single person dies.
 
Imagine if we lived in a world where our buffs had 10h duration and also ticked up to 10h if you were grouped with the right class or in town
 
Imagine if we lived in a world where our buffs had 10h duration and also ticked up to 10h if you were grouped with the right class or in town
idk i've been playing my enchanter with a druid and i havent noticed a single thing about buffs or the AE weapon nerfs. if it doesnt effect the classes i play it must not be a real issue
 
yeah i play a necro and paladin and together with some clickies i have weaker versions of all the same buffs i use to have on both characters, so the buff changes must be working, right?
 
random idea make soulbound a buff that basically saves the state of all your buffs when you die so they are restored to the same state when you are rezzed. that way even if the raid recovery takes longer than 10 min you have buffs when you get back. or maybe just add that to the rezzing spells/items without making it a buff.
 
Following on the original post from this thread with a quick and dirty fix idea.

We read in the patch note:
It was decided that an aura-type system satisfied a majority of the above conditions.

Make it exactly that, whatever group buff a caster has on himself gets autocast on people in his group/raid as they zone, get rezed, join group, etc, if they don't already have better.

It's not perfect, but if there is any buff we don't like we have /cm blockbuff and at least we can stop harassing casters every 2 minutes for buffs, unless that is the vision.

As a by product, Soulbound in it's current form makes sense again and the spirit of the buff revamp is intact.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom